Last week, Bitcoin’s price dropped by more than 50% from its all-time high of $68,000 — its lowest level in six months. Ethereum followed bitcoin’s lead and so did just about every other cryptocurrency.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev teased at a crypto conference Tuesday that the platform plans to roll out a new crypto wallet that allows customers to access non-fungible token markets, decentralized exchanges, and swap tokens by the end of 2022, according to TechCrunch. The new wallet will be a standalone app from Robinhood’s existing stock and crypto platform, functioning like other non-custodial wallets. Since the start of the year, Robinhood has been actively growing its presence in crypto through a number of initiatives. It rolled out custodial crypto wallets, listed several new coins, and announced plans to integrate with the Bitcoin Lightning Network for faster, lower-fee transactions.
Users of the entirely separate Web 3 wallet will be able to lend, stake, yield farm and even buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – much as they might with a MetaMask wallet. Those capabilities do not exist in Robinhood’s earlier wallet. It was not immediately clear which blockchain the custodial wallet intends to support.
While Coinbase’s Web 3 wallet is integrated, Robinhood’s is not. Robinhood Crypto Chief Technology Officer Johann Kerbrat said the new wallet will specifically cater to users who seek “advanced use cases” of crypto.
“We see this new product as a kind of brother for Web 3,” Kerbrat told CoinDesk in a phone interview prior to Tenev’s keynote. He said the team is “building this product as effectively a browser.”
The wallet will allow users to purchase and store NFTs, earn yield on assets, and access a host of tokens not currently available on Robinhood.